The Rave Assemblage

Abstract

In 2011 Sean Leneghan published as a monograph his PhD thesis about ecstasy use in nightclubs, based on fieldwork in Sydney, Australia, from mid-2000 (Leneghan, 2011). The book provides a fairly orthodox account of the city’s club culture. Leneghan describes sociocultural context, the clubs, the paraphernalia, the ‘types’ of ecstasy users and the roles they played. Anyone who knows the early work of Beck et al. (1989) and Beck and Rosenbaum (1994) would be familiar with this approach to understanding the experiences of ecstasy users.